Look honey, that Episcopal priest is preaching about the PCA.

Hat tip: Alastair, and yes, he’s been reading Girard, I’m sure, but also Paul–and no matter how one might disagree with his Episcopal application, it does apply to the hate-steve-wilkins-if-you’re-pious campaign (Here’s a general rule, just because the Gospel call to unity is misused by liberals, doesn’t mean it has no bearing on gossip and internet show trials.)

I’ve always wanted to read William Willimon because Rich Lusk has found him so valuable. When I heard he spoke at Red Mountain PCA, I was sort of jealous. But thanks to the church sermon page, I am listening to the sermon right now.

I love the internet!

Continuing my response to this.

The third criticism Lane lists is especially gratifying by the time the reader reaches it because

1. It doesn’t involve accusing Wright of holding a position that he does not hold (with one major exception, see below), and
2. It doesn’t involve Gordon saying something about Wright in which he had openly declared the opposite in the Westminster Theological Journal.

However, I can only conclude that Gordon is plainly wrong, though I reserve the right to change my mind when I read him.

In the first place, nothing he says seems weighty enough to counter a positive case.

Secondly, anyone who reads WSPRS can attest that Wright affirms a judicial context for justification. Claiming that Wright removes justification from a judicial context is akin to claiming that the problem with Marx was that he thought the civil government should obey the law of God as found in Holy Scripture.

Third, the Seifrid strategy of claiming that “righteousness” applies to “his unwavering commitment to judge his creation uprightly-without compromise, favoritism, or inequity” and therefore is not to be considered covenant faithfulness, posits a false antithesis. For example, Wright himself teaches that the righteousness of God is vindicated in Christ’s work of salvation because He “has dealt with sin on the cross; he has done so impartially.”

Fourth, using 3.1 as evidence that Paul would never use “righteous” to designate God’s faithfulness, while bold, is plainly the opposite of what the passage teaches us.

Here it is Romans 3.3-5 with the two word groups emphasized:

What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,

“That you may be justified in your words,
and prevail when you are judged.”

But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.)

This passage does not show two different meanings but establishes precisely what Wright and many other Bible scholars are saying. The “faithfulness of God” (v. 3) is also the “righteousness of God” (v. 5)–just as “their faithlessness” and “our unrighteousness” are both referring to human sin. The Psalm quotation gives even further evidence of this (if any was necessary) because it refers to God being declared righteous (“justified”) in against the accusation that human faithlessness nullifies the faithfulness of God. Being declared faithful means being declared righteous in this passage.

The argument Lane relates is similarly astounding. “His argument runs like this: the wrath of God must have reference to His judicial wrath. that same wrath is revealed in the righteousness of 1:17-18 in Jesus Christ’s propitiation of God’s wrath. Therefore, the righteousness of God does not refer to covenantal faithfulness (which isn’t even remotely present in the context), but rather to God’s law-wrath.”

First of all, if “righteousness of God” is parallel to “wrath of God,” then Gordon is admitting that the translation “righteousness from God” is incorrect. In fact, if Lane is summarizing his views accurately, he is reverting to the precise position that tormented Martin Luther. This just can’t be right, but it is the only place the argument leads. And far from being a real criticism of Wright, it fundamentally vindicates his point that “the righteousness of God” refers to his own character and attitude, not a quality that is transferred.

Second, there is a contrast between verse 17 and 18. It is not uncontextual to understand Paul as saying that the Gospel reveals God’s covenantal faithfulness because his wrath is also revealed and he has promised to deal with it.

Thirdly, covenantal and judicial categories are simply not mutually exclusive. It is no great leap to say that the Gospel reveals God’s covenant faithfulness which involves pouring judicial wrath on sin.

Lane’s review gets even more confusing:

He argues that NTW has some hermeneutical problems with regard to the dik-group. He argues that NTW takes an ambiguous occurence of the word (dikaiosune theou) and renders it in a manner that is different than its unambiguous usage in the very same context. That passage in question is Romans 3:5-4:6.

But no commentator alive or dead takes “righteousness of God” in 3.5 as imputed righteousness from God. Wright’s entire point is that we should be consistent with what we know about Romans 3.5.

Gordon notes that no Reformed theologian says that justification is about a person’s relationship to God. Rather, it is about a right standing before God and the law (pg. 72).

Okay. Let’s play that game: No one says good citizenship is about a person’s relationship with their country. Rather it is about their right standing before God and the laws of the country.” More false antithesis.

Dr. Derek Thomas actually linked to an interview made and webcast by a CREC church ministry.

How cool is that!

Continuing my thoughts on this review…

The second major criticism Gordon makes against Wright, according to Lane, is

“Wright’s Christus Victor language of defeat of enemies does not mention God’s wrath as a serious threat that has been deflected by the death and resurrection of Christ” (pg. 62).

I’m really not sure, at this point. What book Dr. Gordon has been reading. I will concede that page 62 may not mention God’s wrath, but what about page 48 where Wright declares that “death of Jesus” was “the moment when God executed judicial sentence on sin itself (Romans 3.24-26; 8.3)…”

To repeat: Wright says that the death of Jesus was “the moment when God executed judicial sentence on sin itself.” There is no way to get around it. Here, N. T. Wright says, by any known use of the English language, that God punished sin in the cross of Christ. Indeed, Wright uses forensic terms. God passed a “judicial” sentence. He punished sin in Christ’s death. Furthermore, the texts that explain that God did this include Romans 3.24-26.

Later Wright revisits Romans saying,

All humankind is thus in the dock in God’s metaphorical law court. In terms of the law-court diagram [i.e. the triangle of Judge, Plaintiff/Prosecutor, and Defendant], it is no longer the case of Israel coming before God as the plaintiff, bringing a charge against the pagans. Gentile and Jew alike are now guilty defendants” (p.106).

So Jew and Gentile alike are under condemnation and that condemnation is dealt with by passing judicial sentence on sin in the death of Jesus. It is especially interesting that this statement about Jew and Gentile comes from Wright’s brief overview of the content of Romans 3.21-26. there he also writes that “the death and resurrection of Jesus” is “the point at which, and the means by which, God’s covenant purpose for Israel, that is, his intention to deal once and for all with the sin of the world, would finally be accomplished.” He also writes:

…the gospel of Jesus reveals God’s righteousness, in that God is himself righteous, and, as part of that, God is the one who declares the believer to be righteous. Once again we must insist that there is of course a “righteous” standing, a status, which human beings have as a result of God’s gracious verdict in Christ… He has been true to the covenant, which always aimed to deal with the sin of the world; he has dealt with sin on the cross; he has done so impartially, making a way of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike; and he now, as the righteous judge, helps and saves the helpless who cast themselves on his mercy (p. 107).

Since I don’t have the essay, I can’t know why Gordon feels he is in the right to simply criticize a motif as not doing justice to the serious threat of God’s wrath. I would also like to know if Gordon has listened to Wright attack the NIV for not using the word propitiation in translating Romans 3.25. In his commentary on Romans he insists on this due to the fact that the context demands a solution to the problem of God’s wrath which has been described from Romans 1.18ff.

The fact is that Wright has consistently talked about God’s wrath and the role of the cross in satisfying it. From 1985 (PDF):

Hence, the irony; claiming to represent Israel, he is cast out by those who themselves claim to represent Israel; in urging Israel to forswear rebellion, he is himself executed as a rebel by the Romans. The death he dies is Israel’s death, and the pattern of healings and welcomes which make up so much of the gospel narratives indicates the motive: he dies Israel’s death in order that Israel may not die it. He takes the wrath of Rome (which is, like the wrath of Assyria or Babylon, the historical embodiment of the wrath of God) upon himself so that, in his vindication, Israel may find herself brought through the judgment and into the true Kingdom, may see at last the way to life and follow it while there is yet time.

Or consider this from his entry on Paul in the New Dictionary of Theology (David F. Wright, Sinclair B. Ferguson, J.I. Packer (eds), 496-499. IVP):

These ultimate enemies had been overcome in the cross and resurrection. As the innocent representative of Israel, and hence of the human race, the Messiah had allowed sin and death to do their worst to him, and had emerged victorious. Sin’s power had exhausted itself by bringing to his death the one human being who, himself without sin, could properly be vindicated by God after death (2 Cor. 5:21). The cross thus stands at the heart of Paul’s theology, as the basis of his mission (2 Cor. 5:14-21), and of his redefinition of the people of God. The fact of universal sin (Rom. 1:18-3:20) demonstrates the necessity for a saving act of pure grace (3:21-26): the divine wrath (1:18 – 2:16) is turned aside, as at the exodus, by the blood of sacrifice (3:24-6).

And then this from 2005 on Ephesians 2.11:

indeed Ephesians, which I take to be by Paul in the teeth of the scholarly fashion of the last hundred years, provides as a whole an excellent study in how to take seriously not only the bits of Paul which sustain our particular traditions but the bits which challenge us to go deeper. In this instance, the word connects together the two halves of the chapter, 2.1–10 and 2.11–21. The first half provides a classic statement of the fact that all humankind, Jew as well as Gentile, is enslaved to sin in body and mind, and of the fact that it is by God’s mercy and love that we are forgiven our sins and saved from wrath. ‘By grace you have been saved, through faith; and this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God; not because of works, lest anyone should boast’. A central statement of a great Pauline theme to stand beside anything from Romans and Galatians.

So, in all of this, why has Gordon changed from his positively glowing review of The Climax of the Covenant in the 1994 Westminster Theological Journal? There, in singing Wright’s praises, Gordon saw the victory over the powers and the truth of God dealing with sin punitively as all consistent and consistently proclaimed by Wright:

as a covenant-administration with its curse-sanctions, it [the Mosaic covenant] served to concentrate and focus sin on a single people, and finally upon that people’s Messiah. In the Messiah’s triumph over sin, redemption appears, but the concentration of sin upon Messiah was a critical first stage, and that stage began in the concentration of sin upon the earlier servant of God, corporate Israel: “God has deliberately given the Torah to be the means of concentrating the sin of human kind in one place, namely, in his people, Israel—in order that it might then be concentrated yet further, drawn together on to Israel’s representative, the Messiah—in order that it might there be dealt with once and for all” (p. 196, cf. also pp. 39, 167, 181, 182, n. 28).

This is exactly the theology of What Saint Paul Really Said, so why is it now a source of criticism rather than praise?

More later.

This review is worth interacting with. It would be better to review Gordon’s essay myself, but I don’t yet have a copy.

But the three criticisms Lane lists are each rather interesting.

The first is

“Wright understands the New Testament primarily as a fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham, not as a fulfillment of the redemptive pledge imbedded in the Adamic curse” (pg. 61, emphasis original).

I have to say this is a rather amazing statement coming from Gordon. In 1994 he said something different about Wright. He wrote:

The recurring argument of Wright’s thesis is that Paul follows an Adamic theology, in which God’s “servant” is first Adam, then corporate Israel, then Israel’s Messiah. Where the first two fail, the last succeeds. The first two become servants whose disobedience causes their respective stories to be stories of sin and wrath, each depicting the state of the race as a whole in a single, focused servant. The last Servant is one in whom also sin is focused, indeed, even more so than the previous two, but for the purpose of bearing it obediently and vicariously, and thereby providing redemption: “The theological structure I have proposed shows that Servant-christology and Adam-christology belong well together, and cannot be played off against each other. Both, in the last analysis, are Israel-christologies” (p. 61, emphasis his; cf. also pp. 21, 25, 46).

Gordon was reviewing a series of essays by Wright on Paul. I find it strange that Gordon would take a brief tract and decide simply on the basis of what the author does not say explicitly therein, that this constitutes a denial of “the Redemptive pledge imbedded in the Adamic curse.”

Is there any evidence that Wright has made an about-face on this issue? Here is Wright from 1998:

After the summary statement of Romans 5:1-11, … Paul tells an overarching version of the biblical story from Adam to Christ, in which the whole human race prior to the coming of the Messiah is enslaved to sin as Israel was to Egypt. Shockingly, the arrival of the Torah (the Law) (Romans 5:20) only intensified Israel’s state of Adamic sinfulness. Within that narrative the problem is, How is liberation then effected?

Does one see here any hint that we are expected to chose between the story of Adam and the story of Abraham? Not at all. The delivery of the promises to Abraham is a “liberation” from being “enslaved to sin” which happend “to the whole human race” “from Adam.” Furthermore, “Israel, despite her great vocation, remains ‘in Adam’ (Romans 7:1-6, 13-25). God, however, has dealt with sin and given new life, to those who share the resurrection of Christ through the Spirit (Romans 8:1-11).”

When I found out that Bob Cara had passed off the same criticism of N. T. Wright to a captive audience of RUF ministers, I assumed it was a mistake–that Cara had only hastily read one book (“hastily” since he announced the book denied Pauline authorship to some books in the Pauline canon when it did no such thing). I am completely lacking any such understanding of Gordon’s claims.

And then there is this in 2005 long after What Saint Paul Really Said, was published,

I have argued elsewhere that the book of Genesis demands to be read in this way: the promises to Abraham echo the commands to Adam, and the whole argument of the book, the whole point of the narrative, is that God has called Abraham and his family to undo the sin of Adam, even though Abraham and his family are themselves part of the problem as well as the bearers of the solution.

How does this compare to the claim that, “Wright understands the New Testament primarily as a fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham, not as a fulfillment of the redemptive pledge imbedded in the Adamic curse”?

More later.

Here is a good nutshell summary of the new orthodoxy which we are all now supposed to claim is the only true Reformed Faith. It is, of course, completely unconfessional.

1. WCF XIV.2 does not describe what faith results in, but what faith is. How is “and embracing the promises of God for this life, and that which is to come” anything other than faith itself? Furthermore, the confession never uses the formula “faith is …” but rather tells us the “principal acts” of faith. If one is not faith, there is no reason for the other to be. In fact, if we adopt this entirely novel and untraditional hermeneutic for the Westminster Confession, we are going to have to admit that the chapter on Repentance never bothers to define repantance. It never states what “repentance is” but only gives us a list of things that happen “by” repentance.
   

   By it [repentance unto life], a sinner, out of the sight and sense not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the holy nature, and righteous law of God; and upon the apprehension of his mercy in Christ to such as are penitent, so grieves for, and hates his sins, as to turn from them all unto God, purposing and endeavoring to walk with him in all the ways of his commandments.

2. WCF 11.2 is talking about justifying faith when we read “Faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification: yet is it not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other saving graces, and is no dead faith, but worketh by love.” The Westminster Larger Catechism (Q&A #73) does not contradict this; and claiming the Westminster Divines really wanted us to use an argument from silence, in contradiction to their own confession, to eliminate what those “in the FV are trying to do” is completely preposterous.
3. The Westminster Confession does have a perfectly good formula to eliminate the heresy that is being false attributed to Reformed Ministers under the label “FV.” The formula is this:
   

   Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifieth: not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness, by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.

   Notice here again that faith, which in context can only be justifying, is singled out as one among other acts of “evangelical obedience.” Duh. Does the Bible command us to rest on Christ alone? Then doing so is, by definition, obedience! The fact that some would rather redefine pelagianism as Reformed Orthodoxy just to get a convoluted judgment passed in their fratricidal war itself speaks volumes.

Posted here:

1. We affirm that a Christian may “be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace” (C 18.1).
2. We affirm that this assurance is not a bare and conjectural persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope but an “infallible assurance of faith” (C 18.2-3).
3. a. We affirm that the following are grounds for assurance: the promises of salvation (C 18.2), the inward evidence of grace (C 18.2), the testimony of the Holy Spirit of adoption (C 18.2), the doctrine of election (C 3.8), the presence of true faith (L 80), and the endeavor to walk in all good conscience before God (L 80).
3. b. We deny that baptism is the sole or primary means of assurance.

At this point I’m not sure what to say. 3.a. somehow fails to affirm that baptism is a means of assurance at all! Is baptism or is it not “not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible church; but also, to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace, of his ingrafting into Christ, of regeneration, of remission of sins, and of his giving up unto God, through Jesus Christ, to walk in newness of life”? Is baptism as a sacrament given “to represent Christ, and his benefits; and to confirm our interest in him” or is it not? Affirmations about assurance in the Westminster Confession are authoritative for office holders even if they are found in a chapter without the word “assurance” in the chapter heading.

Given the importance of a seal to true faith as a confirmation of one’s interest in Christ, and the high importance of being ingrafted into Christ, of which baptism, particularly, is a seal to the part baptized, I fail to see how a person who claimed baptism was the primary means of assurance could be ruled outside the system of doctrine (which is plainly the intent of this paper, see below). Remember, one could affirm this without denying anything in the list in 3.a.

However, I don’t think anyone says that baptism is the primary means of assurance. More likely there are people (including me) who simply haven’t developed a rating system but believe that baptism in the Bible and the Westminster documents is more important than it is in American Evangelical culture, including conservative Presbyterian culture. Simply reading what the catechisms say about the sacraments as effectual means of salvation for the elect or the Larger on improving one’s baptism should demonstrate this and show that, if the “Federal Vision” didn’t exist, then faithful Presbyterians would need to invent it.

As to the implication that anyone thinks “that baptism is the sole … means of assurance,” that is simply a fiction. There is no one who claims this.